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The Pulse is a regular feature on the Marketplace Index with David Brancaccio that measures the economy with a daily alternative indicator.enItalian police seize $6 trillion in fake bondshttp://www.marketplace.org/topics/world/daily-pulse/italian-police-seize-6-trillion-fake-bonds

The pulse is up on news that today Italian police seized fake U.S. Treasury bonds with a face value of a cool $6 trillion. That’s more than a third of the U.S. national debt.

The counterfeits were discovered in a Zurich, Switzerland warehouse as part of an investigation into mafia activity in the Vulture-Melfese area in the southern Basilicata region, according to the BBC.

Contained in three metal trunks bearing the inscription “Chicago Federal Reserve System,” the fake bonds were printed printed in $1 billion denominations and treated to look like they dated back to 1934.

Those attempting to perpetrate the fraud were trying to sell them to developing nations. Arrest warrants have been issued for eight suspects who’ve been linked with trying to buy plutonium from unnamed Nigerian sources.

Investigators who uncovered the attempted fraud said the forgeries presented “severe threats” to international economic security.

The pulse is down today on this realization: no matter how you spin it, the housing market in America is still broken.

According to the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index, 75.9 percent of all homes sold in the fourth quarter of 2011 couldhave been “comfortably purchased” by families earning the national median income of $64,200. The highest percentage recorded in the two-decade history of the index.

Great. Let’s go buy a house! Not so easy, is it?

While the HOI may be grounded in good arithmetic and even better intentions, for those struggling in the real world of modern-day homeownership, that nugget feels less like a helpful statistic and more like a taunt.

The reality of purchasing a home in today’s economy is far less rosy, to say the least. Millions are underwater on their homes, and those with some cash and a decent job face straightjacket-tight lending restrictions. Add in a shadow inventory of homes in all stages of foreclosure, and it’s going to take more than spin to wake America from its housing nightmare.

The pulse is up on news that snacking is has become big business. Today, breakfast cereal giant Kellogg announced its purchase of the Pringles chip brand from Procter & Gamble for a top-popping $2.695 billion.

On store shelves since 1968, Pringles are now sold in over 140 countries and come in flavors ranging from soft-shell crab to jalapeno to blueberry.

The sale wasn’t just a spontaneous case of the munchies according to Kellogg’s CEO John Bryant. “Pringles has an extensive global footprint that catapults Kellogg to the number two position in the worldwide savory snacks category, helping us achieve our objective of becoming a truly global cereal and snacks company," Bryant said in a statement about the acquisition.

Pringles does around $1 billion in annual sales, and Kellogg -- the manufacturer of Corn Flakes, Raisin Bran and Apple Jacks -- will be hoping the saddle-shaped "chips" will bring it closer to the company’s goal of owning our afternoon eating habits just like it owns our mornings.

The Pulse is down today on the fear we may set a new record this summer at the pump.

The Department of Energy announced the average price of a gallon of gas rose to $3.51 yesterday. According to AAA's Fuel Gauge Report, this time last year, gas was $3.12 a gallon. Gas prices heat up as the weather does, but we’ve never broken the $3.50 barrier before March. Not even in the summer of 2008, when the national average soared to more than $4 a gallon.

“This time, the dubious milestone was hit weeks before prices usually rise because of refineries typically shutting down for spring maintenance, and weeks before the prices rise again when states switch from less expensive winter blends of gasoline to more complicated and more expensive summer blends,” writes Ronald D. White in the Los Angeles Times today.

Californians see the worst of high gas prices, typically about 10 percent more per gallon than the national average. White tells us that February is usually the month gas prices fall, but this year Californians are paying 7.7 cents more than they were a week ago. If prices continue on their current trajectory, experts say, by June, drivers in Los Angeles could be paying $5 a gallon at the pump.

California haters will smile at that tidbit, but remember, the rest of us won’t be far behind.

The pulse is down today on news that veterans are having an even tougher time than the rest of us finding work. Unemployment among America’s vets is hovering at a stifling 13 percent. Worse yet, nearly a third of vets under 24 find themselves without a job, according to the Indianapolis Star.

That’s led big U.S. firms to include veterans in their expansion plans. A fifth of the 17,000 employees JPMorgan hired last year were ex-military, and that wasn’t by accident. “We want to do our part to help America grow again,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told Fox in a recent interview.

General Electric is also making an intentional push to employ U.S. veterans. GE’s announced it plans on adding 5,000 vets to its payroll in the next five years as part of its “Hiring Our Heroes” initiative. Other companies with similar mandates include SeatonCorp, U.S. Infrastructure Corp. of Carmel, Burger King and Fifth Third Bank.

The Pulse is down a beat today on news that Americans are less enthusiastic about spending their hard-earned cash than we were a month ago. That’s according to the February consumer-sentiment index from Reuters and the University of Michigan. It fell 2.5 points, from a one-year high of 75 in January. (To give you a little perspective, the index has soared as high as 112 in January of 2000 and sunk as low as 55.3 in November 2008.)

The drop seems counterintuitive for those who follow macroeconomic issues closely. Markets are up (the Dow’s up more than 2,000 points since October), jobs are returning (the U.S. economy added 243,000 new jobs in January), wronged homeowners got some relief this week (in the form of a $25 billion settlement between big banks and the Feds), and even Greece seems to have grabbed a lifeline (in the form of a $172 billion eurozone bailout).

So why the fall dip in consumer sentiment?

Many economists are looking past the rose-tinted headlines and pointing out that average Americans are still struggling with real issues, like stagnant wages and creeping gas prices.

The Pulse quickened today on news that some justice is coming to the creators of a housing bubble in the U.S. that culminated in a seemingly endless foreclosure fiasco.

How much justice? About $25 billion worth.

Attorneys general of every state except Oklahoma came to a deal today with five major U.S. lenders in an attempt to right some of the wrongs of banks, from so-called “robosignings” to improper foreclosure practices.

The agreement will see B of A, Chase, Wells Fargo, Citi and Ally Financial reduce the loan amounts of nearly a million American households. Another 750,000 households will receive a $2,000 check as compensation for being improperly foreclosed on.

The settlement also stipulates banks make foreclosure their last resort, and they will now be barred from foreclosing on a homeowner under consideration for a loan modification.

A website has been set up to help homeowners figure out if they’re due anything in the settlement. On the homepage, it spells out in plain language the crimes that led to this moment: “The agreement settles state and federal investigations finding that the country’s five largest loan servicers routinely signed foreclosure related documents outside the presence of a notary public and without really knowing whether the facts they contained were correct. Both of these practices violate the law.”

When announcing the deal today, President Obama made his feelings about the agreement clear. “This isn’t just good for these families,” he said firmly. “It’s good for their neighborhoods, it’s good for their communities and it’s good for our economy.”

The Pulse slowed today on news that fewer Americans are quitting their jobs. It sounds counterintuitive, but what economists call “churn” -- when an employee leaves, thus opening a spot for someone new -- is actually a sign of a healthy job market.

When someone quits, they make way for promoting and hiring. New employees bring new skills and ideas, and those lead to greater profits. In fact, historically, high churn rates among American workers are often cited as key underlying factor in the country’s economic success.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that just two million of us gave our two-weeks notice in December, down a third from pre-recession averages. Two and a half years after the “end” of the Great Recession of 2007-09, American workers have become risk averse when it comes to big career decisions.

“Quitting, hiring and firing are all part of churn -- job turnover that, unlike layoffs or expansions, doesn't change the long-term size of a company,” Ben Casselman writes in the Journal today. “Churn makes up a huge part of the job market's daily turnover. A recent paper by researchers at Stanford University and the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that during the 2007-2009 recession, 80 percent of the reduction in hiring was associated with lower levels of churn, rather than with a decline in job creation.”

As the U.S. economy finds its feet again, experts will be looking at our willingness to swap jobs as a sign of a bona fide recovery. One question remains. Which comes first: jobs or our willingness to leave them?

The Pulse is up sharply today on news that America is edging closer to energy independence. After 20 years of deepening reliance on foreign sources, domestic energy production has surged in just the last half decade to 81 percent of what we consume.

A study by Bloomberg attributes the sharp tack toward independence in large part to a combination of new oil- and gas-drilling technologies that have unearthed vast energy deposits trapped beneath American soil.

We're also getting more fuel-efficient. In 1978, Americans’ cars got 19.9 miles per gallon on average, but by 2011, that had risen to 29.6 mpg. If automakers stick to the deal they recently struck with the Obama administration, by 2025 the average new car will be getting 54.5 mpg.

The report doesn't spend much time on the role of renewable energy (solar, wind, etc.) in our future.

While the study imagines the U.S. becoming the biggest energy producer on earth by 2020, total independence might still be a way off. Bloomberg quotes Philip Verleger, a former director of the office of energy policy at the Treasury Department and founder of PKVerleger LLC, a consulting firm in Aspen, Colo., as saying, “We aren’t there yet, but it looks like we’re blundering into a solution for the energy problem.”

The Pulse is down on news that what we think of as “toys” may just be changing. Despite a record-breaking year for holiday spending in the U.S., today, toy giant Hasbro reported fourth-quarter profits in 2011 fell 1 percent.

The maker of Monopoly, Life, and Scrabble blamed weakness in its board game sales for the slump, promising a new golden era for games is in the pipeline.

"(We have) established the new Gaming Center of Excellence, and they are innovating, creating new technologies and inventing new brands," Hasbro president and CEO Brian Goldner told analysts on a conference call.

The company’s underwhelming fourth quarter is certainly not an indicator of our passion for games and toys.

In fact, video games like "Modern Warfare 3" (which reached the billion-dollar mark faster than the film "Avatar") are rivaling blockbuster films in sales. Mobile apps, too, have exploded in popularity in recent years, and so have the mobile devices we use them on. Apple sold 15 million iPads and more than twice that many iPhones in the fourth quarter of 2011.

So maybe it’s less about the games we play and more about adapting them compellingly to the “boards” we play them on.

Despite the unbridled joy surrounding today’s January job numbers, the Pulse is flat on news the federal government collected less than half as much in corporate tax receipts in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2011, as they did just a few years prior. Corporations paid a mere 12.1 percent of profits in taxes last year. Compare that to the average corporate tax rate of 25.6 percent paid between 1987 and 2008.

So where did all that cash go?

The Wall Street Journal says the culprit here is a not-so-little tax break called “bonus depreciation.” It allowed corporations to write off investments in machinery and equipment in the year they’re bought instead of over time. This subsidy in the tax code saved corporations some $55 billion over the past 2 years.

According to the Journal: “Union Pacific Co. said the benefit lowered the railroad's taxes by $450 million last year compared with the year before. Energy company Dominion Resources Inc. has said the bonus depreciation provision will cut its income taxes by $1.2 billion to $2.1 billion in 2011 through 2013, even as the tax break shrinks. Shedding light on its 2011 taxes, Time Warner Cable Inc. said it expects to pay $700 million more in taxes this year, assuming capital expenditure is flat, now that the stimulus benefit is lower.”

In a day and age where everything has a political spin, you could easily paint this news with brush strokes of either positivity or negativity. Those tax breaks have helped get big companies spending on replacement equipment, but when you consider that those revenues are key to funding government programs, national security, and ultimately the total the U.S. owes its creditors, maybe it’s a good thing that the “bonus depreciation” loophole will eventually close in 2014.

The Pulse is up today on news that the American worker is finally running out of productivity bandwidth. According to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. workers were 0.7 percent more productive in the fourth quarter of 2011, down sharply from previous quarters.

Productivity, as the Labor Department explains in its report, follows this formula: “Labor productivity, or output per hour, is calculated by dividing an index of real output by an index of hours worked of all persons, including employees, proprietors, and unpaid family workers.”

Today’s uptick in productivity is the result of Americans working 2.9 percent more hours and producing 3.6 percent more snorkels, or Chevys, or cleaner swimming pools, or whatever they work on all day. Our 0.7 percent hike in productivity in the fourth quarter comes after a 1.9 percent jump in the third, so while we’re doing more, we’re doing less of it.

So what? Well, we’re tapped out -- that’s what. But being pushed to a limit could be a good thing, because with promising signs of growth on the horizon, the next logical step for growing businesses is to hire more Americans.

The Pulse dropped today on news that 28 percent of Americans are currently underwater on their homes. That’s up from 22 percent just a year ago, according to research by Zillow Inc., a Seattle-based real estate group.

Zillow’s chief economist Stan Humphries told Bloomberg that home prices fell 3 percent in the first quarter of 2012 before adding that he expects prices to drop up to 9 percent over the course of the year. Not great news for the approximately 11 million Americans who owe more than their homes are worth.

“We get tired of telling such a grim story, but unfortunately this is the story that needs to be told,” Humphries told Bloomberg reporter John Gittelsohn. “Demand is still quite anemic due to unemployment and the fact that home values are still falling. And that tends to make people more cautious about buying.”

The one dim light in Humphries’ outlook is that he thinks 2012 could be the bottom of the long fall for housing prices. Only time will tell.

President Obama thinks he has a plan to help streamline the refinancing process for those looking to get their heads above water. His proposal would give homeowners access to redoing their mortgages at record low rates though a new government program. The proposed lifeline could mean a $3,000 savings for the average borrower each year. The problem is, Congressional sign-off may be required to enact aspects of the proposal, and in a hotly contested election year, that seems unlikely.

The Pulse is up today on news that debt collectors have been getting some unnerving calls lately, too. Theirs are coming from the Federal Trade Commission, who received more than 165,000 complaints last year from Americans who felt they’d been illegal pursued for debts they owe. That’s a new record.

As part of a new push to enforce fair debt-collection practices, yesterday the FTC announced a $2.5 million settlement with Asset Acceptance Capital Corporation for illegally coercing people to pay debts they no longer owe, reports the Wall Street Journal.

In time, all debts legally expire. The lifespan of a debt varies from state to state, but paying any portion of “past-statute” debt can reset the clock, giving collectors free reign to keep harassing those they’re trying to collect from. It’s called “re-aging,” and while it’s legal, the FTC is pursuing collectors who break the law by not disclosing the statutes during the collection process.

With the practice widespread, the FTC says stay tuned for more enforcement actions.

The Pulse is up today on news that 2011 may have been the year that charitable giving may have returned to pre-recession levels. The Wall Street Journal reports that organizations like Oxfam America, Feeding America and Save the Children saw notable growth in 2011 donations.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which has cashiers solicit donations as they scan your purchases, brought in more than $64 million -- $3 million more that it did in 2010. The Salvation Army's "Red Kettle" campaign alone rang in nearly $150 million -- 4 percent better than last holiday season.

The biggest growth was, of course, in online donating. Oxfam America's "Unwrapped" online gift catalog brought in a third more than it did in 2010, and Feeding America, which fights hunger in the U.S. through a nationwide network of food banks, saw 2011 donations grow nearly 20 percent with the help of a big online push.

The numbers are still being crunched, but when all receipts are tallied, charitable giving in 2011 could grow as much as 3.5 percent over 2010’s tally of $291 billion. That might just equal 2007's pre-recession high of $307 billion.

The pulse is up today on news that the 30-year precipitous drop in union membership has plateaued.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report, 11.8 percent of workers counted themselves amongst the ranks of organized labor in 2011, almost half the number recorded in 1983 -- the first year that data was available.

But, here's what we thought was interesting: that number is "essentially unchanged" from 2010.

The drop in union membership over the past three decades is largely attributed to the loss of manufacturing and, more recently, construction jobs. Also of note, government employees like teachers and police officers are the most heavily unionized workers, recording membership rates over five times higher than those in the private sector.

And finally, following on the legacy of unionized jobs of the past, baby boomers were the most likely age group to belong -- indicating, perhaps, that while the overall figure rests on a plateau, a cliff may lie ahead when those near-retirement workers leave their collectively bargained jobs.

The Pulse is down today on news that only 23 percent of Americans say they trust the U.S. financial system. That’s according to the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School’s quarterly Financial Trust Index, which “captures the amount of trust that Americans have in the institutions in which they can invest their money.”

The Index found that just 3 in 10 Americans have faith in their bank. That’s down from 39 percent just six months ago. With little lending happening in recent years, banks have looked to a new sources of revenue: fees imposed on everything from using an ATM to talking to a teller in person. In fact, these fees have helped JP Morgan Chase and numerous other banks record profits in 2011.

Banks may have lost some of our trust in recent months, but they have a long way to fall before they’re as doubted as the stock market. A paltry 16 percent of those surveyed reported trusting the markets with their hard-earned cash.

The Index also found that anger over the current financial situation is up dramatically in the past couple years. People reporting to be “angry” or “very angry” rose from 50 percent in 2009 to 62 percent in the most recent survey.

The Pulse is up today on news that U.S. school kids will be eating green foods during the school day that don’t start with the word “gummy.”

With a third of American school kids categorized as “obese,” guidelines for the first overhaul of school lunches in 15 years were announced by the USDA today. As more and more Americans slip closer to the dreaded poverty line, there’s a growing population of students eating subsidized or even free school lunches, and the Obama administration has prioritized making those meals healthier than they have been in recent years.

To promote the new guidelines, Michelle Obama was joined by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and celeb chef Rachael Ray for lunch with school kids at Parklawn Elementary in Alexandria, Va. The First Lady told reporters, “We have a right to expect the food (our kids) get at school is the same kind of food we want to serve at our own kitchen tables.”

But any patron of Whole Foods market can attest that you don’t eat healthier for free. Taxpayers will cover the $3.2 billion price tag to feed their students better over the next five years. If the Obama administration is right, and poor eating habits among children really do contribute to $3 billion in annual medical costs, opening the public coffers to increase the quality of school meals seems like a no-brainer.

The Pulse is up today on news that we Americans are less than half as miserable as we were just six months ago. That’s according to the non-partisan Peterson Institute for International Economics’ bi-annual Augmented Misery Index, which uses an economics-based equation to determine the nation's mood about its finances.

Every six months, the index adds the percentage of change in the inflation rate (consumer price index) to the unemployment rate then subtracts the percentage of change in housing prices. The result of that equation is supposed to correlate to how miserable we are. Big index numbers are bad (the worst the index has ever been is 24.9 in the first half of 2009), low numbers signal better times (like in the second half of 2004, when the index fell to a joyful -2.8).

Today the index fell from 19.3 in the first half of 2011 to just 7.4 in the back half last year. While it's great to see such an improvement, historically speaking, we’re still pretty damn miserable.

Interesting note: It used to be called simply, the Misery Index when it launched in the early 1970s, but later it was “augmented” to include fluctuating values in the housing market. I mean, what’s more miserable than watching your home’s value ebb and flow with the whims of the market?

The Pulse is up today on news that a little planning (but not too much) could save you some cash on your next flight.

Are you that traveler who sets online fare alerts and hopes to find a great deal at the last minute? Or do you buy your airfares six months in advance, when the real savings are supposed to be had? If one of those scenarios describes you, a recent study by ARC, a travel services company, says you may want to rethink your strategy.

The report found that in 2011 the airfare “sweet spot” for flights taking off and landing in the U.S. was actually six weeks advanced purchase, when fares dipped 5.8 percent below the average ticket price of $358.30. That’s a savings of about $20 per flight, or the price of a Miller Lite and some crackers.

The study found no noticeable benefits to buying your ticket 14 weeks or more in advance, but passengers who waited until the week they flew paid almost 40 percent more than the average airfare.